> With their latest data measurements specific to the game, the developers have confirmed the small number of players (11% last week) using mechanical hard drives will witness mission load times increase by only a few seconds in worst cases. Additionally, the post reads, “the majority of the loading time in Helldivers 2 is due to level-generation rather than asset loading. This level generation happens in parallel with loading assets from the disk and so is the main determining factor of the loading time.”

It seems bizarre to me that they'd have accepted such a high cost (150GB+ installation size!) without entirely verifying that it was necessary!

I expect it's a story that'll never get told in enough detail to satisfy curiosity, but it certainly seems strange from the outside for this optimisation to be both possible and acceptable.

Back of the envelope, in the two years since the game was released, this single bug has wasted at least US$10,000,000 of hardware resources. That's a conservative estimate (20% of people who own the game keep it installed, the marginal cost of wasted SSD storage in a gaming PC is US$2.50 per TB per month, the install base grew linearly over time), so the true number is probably several times higher.

In other words, the game studio externalised an eight-figure hardware cost onto their users, to avoid a five-to-six-figure engineering cost on their side.

Data duplication can't just be banned by Steam, because it's a legitimate optimisation in some cases. The only safeguard against this sort of waste is a company culture which values software quality. I'm glad the developers fixed this bug, but it should never have been released to users in the first place.

I've been really curious precisely what changed, and what sort of optimization might have been involved here.

Because offhand, I know you could do things like cute optimizations of redundant data to minimize seek time on optical media, but with HDDs, you get no promises about layout to optimize around...

The only thing I can think of is if it was literally something as inane as checking the "store deduplicated by hash" option in the build, on a tree with copies of assets scattered everywhere, and it was just nobody had ever checked if the fear around the option was based on outcomes.

(I know they said in the original blog post that it was based around fears of client performance impact, but the whole reason I'm staring at that is that if it's just a deduplication table at storage time, the client shouldn't...care? It's not writing to the game data archives, it's just looking stuff up either way...)

Possibly a similar process to when you go into an AWS account, and find dozens of orphaned VMs, a few thousand orphaned disk volumes, etc., saving like $10k/month just deleting unused resources.

AFAIK Helldivers 2 runs some really old engine which was discontinued many years ago. Not "state of the art."

It's also a title that shows you can have a really good game without the latest tech.

Did the duplicated files were even used on pc? Like, do you even have such low access to the file system that you can deduce which duplicated instance has a faster access time on a mechanical hard drive?

I did similar work on a game a long time ago and it took over a month to slim it down to 1/4 of the size but in this case 'at runtime' - the producer wasn't impressed. It looked exactly the same. I wonder if they had any pushback.

23GB is supposed to be "slim"?!

In other news - "Call of Duty installer now takes additional 131GB of space on the disk"